Joseph Conrad’s writings were primarily influenced by his unstable childhood due to Polish revolutions along with his desire to explore the expansive ocean. The impact of these two factors is presented in both Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness. In these novels, Conrad displays the strengths and weaknesses of language as a tool to communicate his stories effectively. Throughout his life, Conrad was exposed to the Polish and English languages, which differ drastically from one another. Conrad was drawn to English due to its expansive vocabulary that provided him with a more diverse range of meanings that he could use to express his ideas (Kuehn 32). In Lord Jim, Conrad reflected the weaknesses of language through his characters, which struggled to find words that could accurately explain their experiences to Marlowe, the narrator. Another weakness Conrad saw in language was portrayed in Heart of Darkness, where language acted as a social barrier almost as often as it was used to communicate. Kurtz, an ivory trader travelling with Marlowe, viewed language as a way to defend the white man’s dominance over the savage Africans, while Marlowe saw it as a primary aspect of civilized societies. Throughout Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Conrad’s writings reflected that he believed language was effective when used to build societies and create connections between people, while its weak points include lacking the ability to express emotions properly and the potential it has to form both social and emotional barriers. Conrad believed that language was the basis for the formation of societies between humans, and he felt that without language, man was as civilized as the animals that lived alongside them. Conrad expounded on this idea within the Heart of Darkness, when he wrote, “I only know that I stood there long enough for the sense of utter solitude to get hold of me so completely that all I had lately seen, all I had heard, and the very human speech itself, seemed to have passed away out of existence, living only for a while longer in my memory, as though I had been the last of mankind” (192). Conrad described the madness that man may plummet into when experiencing an absence of language. Almost every manifestation of a civilized mind would slowly e